Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,144

This is the grave of Dean Rusk.

Born in 1909 in Cherokee County, Georgia, Rusk grew up mostly in Atlanta, where his farming family had moved for better work. The family were also rigid Protestants, Calvinists really, and that would be deep in Rusk’s soul. The family was poor and he at least claimed quite a bit of sympathy with poor black people in the South too, at least compared to other southern whites, it’s probably true. But he was also, like every other working class white man, deeply committed to the Lost Cause ideal after the Civil War and this was almost inevitable in the 1920s South. This was the era of the second KKK after all. For Rusk, this also meant a commitment to military values and so he wanted to go to military schools and do that whole thing. He got a job with an Atlanta lawyer for a couple of years and thanks to saving money and then being part of the ROTC, was able to put himself through Davidson College in North Carolina.

Rusk did very well at Davidson and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study in London. That made him a lifelong Anglophile. He eventually got a job teaching college at Mills College in California in 1934, though he was in the Army Reserves and was frequently called up. He wasn’t a very prominent figure yet, but he did believe in intervening in World War II and stopping Japanese aggression in Asia. He was called back to the Army in 1940 and was involved in the Pacific theater and rose to the rank of colonel.

Although Rusk did not officially give up his college career until 1949, he was in Washington pretty much all the time after World War II, as one of the few Asian experts, or what passed for them. He was involved in providing arms to Vietnamese resistors to the Japanese, among other things, so that passed for expertise in this area where Americans knew effectively nothing but would soon need to know a lot. He briefly worked in the War Department before taking a job at State in late 1945. He was especially supportive of splitting Korea along the 38th parallel after the war, evidently. He took Alger Hiss’ job as director of the Office of Special Affairs after Hiss left government. He was a protege of George Marshall and they agreed on most things, including the disaster that it would be for Harry Truman to recognize Israel; indeed, the creation of Israel has been a complete disaster for the entire globe because it never dealt with the questions of the Nakba in any reasonable way. But Rusk would go along with what the president wanted.

Rusk lobbied to be made Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1950. Within the administration, he lobbied to support Asian nationalist movements, but when he lost those internal battles–Dean Acheson loved him some European colonialism–he would go along. He always went along. But when he gave a speech saying that the U.S. to invade China and overthrow Mao, he was forced to resign, as it was reported upon by Walter Lippmann and made to seem that he was opposing the Truman administration. He didn’t intend that, but he took the fall.

So Rusk spent the next decade at the Rockefeller Foundation. All the while, Ho Chi Minh threw out the French, the Americans desperately tried to prop up a disastrous and unpopular government in South Vietnam, cancelled the agreed upon 1956 elections to unite country, watched the country move toward civil war, and slowly got more involved in this morass.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy nominated Rusk as Secretary of State. He didn’t really want to–he preferred William Fulbright, but the senator was seen as too controversial and had too many enemies in the body that would have to confirm him. Rusk had sucked up to JFK by writing an article saying the president should control all foreign policy with the Secretary of State just his agent and which president didn’t want that? Rusk didn’t necessarily want the job because the pay was bad, but he took it. Like he believed with Mao, he thought Americans bombs were the best answer to Ho Chi Minh. My friends, they were not.

Rusk would support the sending of advisors to Vietnam, starting real American involvement. He believed in other kinds of power too, he was a Rockefeller Foundation guy after all, so soft power was a big thing with him. He also liked free trade as an element of American foreign policy toward developing nations. But it was all backed with the threat of military action. Rusk, to his credit, was not super hawkish during the Cuban Missile Crisis and while he wasn’t the most influential Secretary of State ever, it mattered in that room.

Rusk refused to take a position on overthrowing Diem in 1963 and that infuriated Kennedy. Of course, the administration agreed to do it and it was a disaster. But then so was everything else about American involvement in Vietnam. Rusk frequently played his cards very carefully and Kennedy ended up kind of hating him. Probably he would have been canned. But LBJ did like him and so kept him on. Rusk joined Johnson in resenting the Kennedys and so helped isolate Bobby. After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which Rusk wholeheartedly supported, he continued to be a cheerleader for everything Johnson and Robert McNamara were doing in Vietnam. Rusk refused to believe reports of the corruption and thuggery of the South Vietnamese government and attacked those in the administration who tried to state the truth.

Of course none of this worked out. The administration became increasingly divided, with Rusk and Walt Rostow leading the charge for ever more bombing and troop deployments. Pretty bad when Bob McNamara thinks you are a war crazy lunatic, but that’s how it was by the end of 1966. So Rusk was shocked by the Tet Offensive, since he didn’t want to know the real story.

Rusk stuck it out to the end of Johnson’s term. Now, LBJ wanted to pay Rusk off by naming him to the Supreme Court. But that was vetoed by Senate scumbag James Eastland. See, Rusk’s daughter had married a black man. And there you go, Eastland had too much power for LBJ to defeat here. Rusk ended up at the University of Georgia, despite huge political pressure not to hire him because of his daughter. Ah, the South, it never, ever, ever changes. He also didn’t speak to his son for 15 years because of their very different views of the Vietnam War. Rusk spent the 70s ranting about detente with the Soviets and how it all a big communist conspiracy to dupe the free world. Then he was just Senior Beltway Guy for the last couple decades.

Rusk died in 1994. He was 85 years old. There’s a ton more to say about Rusk since it’s really the story of the Vietnam War and so much else. But this is long enough as it is, so have at it in comments.

Dean Rusk is in Oconee Cemetery, Athens, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other people who were Secretary of State, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Warren Christopher is in Hollywood (as befits his personality…) and Edmund Randolph is in Millwood, Virginia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.